This study is concerned not with famous doctors, but with the rank and file practitioners of the 18th and 19th centuries. Some common assumptions about the history of the medical profession are challenged in this book, based largely on manuscript sources.

Before World War II, the great majority of practicing doctors in England and Wales were general practitioners. They performed their own surgery, and were accustomed to treating a wide variety of illnesses and symptoms. Specialists were few in number, tended to practice in large towns, and were often associated with major hospitals. But rapidly changing medical institutions and services in the twentieth century have compelled specialization even among more modest doctors and hospitals.

'McWhinney's Textbook of Family Medicine' is one of the seminal texts in the field, defining the principles and practices of family medicine as a distinct field of practice. The fourth edition presents six new clinical chapters of common problems in family medicine.

The first collective record of the evolution of general medical practice as an academic discipline over half a century.

This is a history of general practice under the National Health Service, covering the whole of the first 50 years, from 1948 to the present.

This book focuses on a formative period in the development of modern general practice. The foundations of present-day health care in Britain were created in the century before the National Health Service of 1948, when medicine was transformed in its structure, professional status, economic organization, and therapeutic power. In the first full-length study of general practice for these years, Anne Digby deploys an impressive range of hitherto unused archival material and oral testimony to probe the character of general practitioners careers and practices, and to assess their relationships with local communities, a wider society, and the state. An evolutionary approach is adopted to explain the origins and nature of the many changes in medical practice, and the lives of ordinary doctors. The study also explores the gendered nature of medical practice as reflected in the experience of a golden band of women GPs, and examines the hidden role of the doctors wife in the practice.

Conflicting models of selfhood have become central to debates over modern medicine. Yet we still lack a clear historical account of how this psychological sensibility came to be established. The Transformation of the Psyche in British Primary Care, 1880-1970 will remedy this situation by demonstrating that there is nothing inevitable about the current connection between health, identity and personal history. It traces the changing conception of the psyche in Britain over the last two centuries and it demonstrates how these changes were rooted in transformed patterns of medical care. The shifts from private medicine through to National Insurance and the National Health Service fostered different kinds of relationship between doctor and patient and different understandings of psychological distress. The Transformation of the Psyche in British Primary Care, 1880-1970 examines these transformations and, in so doing, provides new critical insights into our modern sense of identity and changing notions of health that will be of great value to anyone interested in the modern history of British medicine.

The Quality and Outcomes Framework has deeply divided UK general practitioners. I commend this book and applaud its determination to scrutinise every aspect of the Quality and Outcomes Framework - good and bad and in-between. - From the Foreword by Iona Heath General practice in the UK faces transformation following the introduction of the Quality & Outcomes Framework (QOF), a pay-for-performance scheme unprecedented in the NHS, and the most comprehensive scheme of its kind in the world. Champions claim the QOF advances the quality of primary care; detractors fear the end of general practice as we know it. The introduction of the QOF provides a unique opportunity for research, analysis and reflection. This book is the first comprehensive analysis of the impact of the QOF, examining the claims and counter-claims in depth through the experience of those delivering QOF, comparisons with other countries, and analysis of the wealth of research evidence emerging. Assessments of the true impact of QOF will influence the development of health services in the UK and beyond. This book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the future of general practice and primary care, including health professionals, trainers, students, MRCGP candidates and researchers, managers, and policy-makers and shapers.